Author: ntanya54

Here’s a quick and dirty Python script that goes through a list of URLs, and for each URL checks HTTP status codes (200, 301, 404, etc.), along with number of redirects and redirect chains (each redirect destination). Saves output into a text file (you can modify to save to CSV, but I used text import feature in Excel to import tab-delimited data).

These days work is fun. I have a handful of project of various complexity, and the deeper I dig, the more related projects I discover.

Example: streamlining and organizing existing apps and setting up continuous integration that works for Python and potentially node in the future.

Python is great and all that. But I’m struggling with all the dependencies and pieces to be managed (module dependency, db, aws storage, cron, source control and remote server management). Using js-only stack with heroku and deployments triggered via git in the past was way quicker.

Marco elaborates on why tools and frameworks for web development have become so complicated and convoluted (and usually unnecessary), in response to PPK’s post.

Web development has never been more complicated or convoluted than it is today due to the sheer quantity of tools (and their rapid rate of change) involved in most modern web-dev environments.

At the Generate conference, Brad Frost also half-jokingly noted that a web developer applying for a job these days must go through a ridiculous list of “frameworks” that he/she must know.

“Our job descriptions contain so many acronyms… How do we keep from drowning in a sea of devices, tools, technologies, Medium posts, tweets, and opinions? And how do we maintain our sanity in the process?”

My short take of this: know why tools exist and what problem they solve, at what cost. Like with anything in this life, you can’t have it all. Frameworks might help (or often appear to help) with speed and cost, but you might lose on quality of the end product, since it is not going to be perfectly custom to your needs.

PPK proposes a solution:

The solution is simple: ditch the tools. All of them. (No, I’m not being particularly subtle here.) Teach the newbies proper web development. That’s it, really.

The web’s answer to the native challenge should be radical simplification, not even more tools.